Greater demands are being placed on communication and computing networks that carry an increasing volume of traffic, such as data, voice and video traffic. As the volume of traffic increases on a network, the need for high speed and high throughput network devices also increases. When transmitting packets through a network, it is desirable that nodes in the network be able to process packets to avoid traffic bottlenecks that can lead to widespread network congestion. When bottlenecks or congestion occur, it is often due to packet buffer memories being filled to capacity, which can cause packets to be dropped.